Law School Grad Forced Into Retail Job Blogs The Loss Of His 'Last Shred Of Dignity'

As the New Year looms, many law graduates with heavy debt have yet to find work as attorneys — including the author of the self-deprecating new blog “Law Grad Working Retail.”

The blog’s anonymous author graduated from a law school that was in the top 50 ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He was on law review and even got a summer position at a firm after his second year. He didn’t get a job offer though.

This grad still hasn’t found legal work and took a job selling cologne just before the holidays to make ends meet. Now he says he’s “liveblogging the loss of my last shred of dignity.” His blog is both funny and heartbreaking.

The funny parts often involve his coworkers assuming he can answer every law-related question they have. His coworker Shaina grills him after it’s discovered that another coworker named Julian is apparently “robbing the stock room blind.” Here’s the exchange:

“LawGrad, you a lawyer,” Shaina began, “can Julian sue the store?”

“For what?”

“You know, accusing him of stealing because he’s Mexican.”

“But he was stealing.”

“So he can’t sue?”

“No.”

The sadder parts involve managers talking to him like he’s an idiot and the constant fear he’ll run into somebody he knows. He really, really doesn’t want anybody to see him cleaning.

“[A]s much as it would suck for a law school classmate to see me selling cologne, seeing me cleaning up broken glass on my hands and knees would be a million times worse,” he writes.

Perhaps the most gutwrenching part of his blog comes when he writes about a picture of the Chicago river on the wall behind the cologne counter where he works.

“They could have picked any picture of Chicago to go on that wall, but they picked this particular part of the city at this particular angle,” he writes. “The building I worked in 2l summer is in this picture. Every day I sit in front of this picture of the firm that no offered me, peddling bullshit to rich arseholes.”